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Solar and wind projects will take the most heat, but the document leaves open the possibility for damage to spread far and wide.
It’s still too soon to know just how damaging the Interior Department’s political review process for renewables permits will be. But my reporting shows there’s no scenario where the blast radius doesn’t hit dozens of projects at least — and it could take down countless more.
Last week, Interior released a memo that I was first to report would stymie permits for renewable energy projects on and off of federal lands by grinding to a halt everything from all rights-of-way decisions to wildlife permits and tribal consultations. At minimum, those actions will need to be vetted on a project-by-project basis by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the office of the Interior deputy secretary — a new, still largely undefined process that could tie up final agency actions in red tape and delay.
For the past week, I’ve been chatting with renewables industry representatives and their supporters to get their initial reactions on what this latest blow from the Trump administration will do to their business. The people I spoke with who were involved in development and investment were fearful of being quoted, but the prevailing sense was of near-total uncertainty, including as to how other agencies may respond to such an action from a vital organ of the federal government’s environmental review process.
The order left open the possibility it could also be applied to any number of projects “related to” solar and wind — a potential trip-wire for plans sited entirely on private lands but requiring transmission across Bureau of Land Management property to connect to the grid. Heatmap Pro data shows 96 renewable energy projects that are less than 7 miles away from federal lands, making them more likely to need federal approval for transmission or road needs, and another 47 projects that are a similar distance away from critical wildlife habitat. In case you don’t want to do the math, that’s almost 150 projects that may hypothetically wind up caught in this permitting pause, on top of however many solar and wind projects that are already in its trap.
At least 35 solar projects and three wind projects — Salmon Falls Wind in Idaho and the Jackalope and Maestro projects in Wyoming — are under federal review, according to Interior’s public data. Advocates for renewable energy say these are the projects that will be the most crucial test cases to watch.
“Unfortunately they’ll be the guinea pigs,” said Mariel Lutz, a conservation policy analyst for the Center for American Progress, who today released a report outlining the scale of job losses that could occur in the wind sector under Trump. “The best way to figure out what this means is to have people and projects try or not try various things and see what happens.”
The data available is largely confined to projects under National Environmental Policy Act review, however. In my conversations with petrified developers this past week, it’s abundantly clear no one really knows just how far-reaching these delays may become. Only time will tell.
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And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Lawrence County, Alabama – We now have a rare case of a large solar farm getting federal approval.
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – It’s time to follow up on the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project.
3. Fairfield County, Ohio – The red shirts are beating the greens out in Ohio, and it isn’t looking pretty.
4. Allen County, Indiana – Sometimes a setback can really set someone back.
5. Adams County, Illinois – Hope you like boomerangs because this county has approved a solar project it previously denied.
6. Solano County, California – Yet another battery storage fight is breaking out in California. This time, it’s north of San Francisco.
A conversation with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute. Elizabeth was one of several researchers involved in a comprehensive review of a decade of energy project litigation – between 2013 and 2022 – under the National Environment Policy Act. Notably, the review – which Breakthrough released a few weeks ago – found that a lot of energy projects get tied up in NEPA litigation. While she and her colleagues ultimately found fossil fuels are more vulnerable to this problem than renewables, the entire sector has a common enemy: difficulty of developing on federal lands because of NEPA. So I called her up this week to chat about what this research found.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So why are you so fixated on NEPA?
Personally and institutionally, [Breakthrough is] curious about all regulatory policy – land use, environmental regulatory policy – and we see NEPA as the thing that connects them all. If we understand how that’s functioning at a high level, we can start to pull at the strings of other players. So, we wanted to understand the barrier that touches the most projects.
What aspects of zero-carbon energy generation are most affected by NEPA?
Anything with a federal nexus that doesn’t include tax credits. Solar and wind that is on federal land is subject to a NEPA review, and anything that is linear infrastructure – transmission often has to go through multiple NEPA reviews. We don’t see a ton of transmission being litigated over on our end, but we think that is a sign NEPA is such a known obstacle that no one even wants to touch a transmission line that’ll go through 14 years of review, so there’s this unknown graveyard of transmission that wasn’t even planned.
In your report, you noted there was a relatively small number of zero-carbon energy projects in your database of NEPA cases. Is solar and wind just being developed more frequently on private land, so there’s less of these sorts of conflicts?
Precisely. The states that are the most powered by wind or create the most wind energy are Texas and Iowa, and those are bypassing the national federal environmental review process [with private land], in addition to not having their own state requirements, so it’s easier to build projects.
What would you tell a solar or wind developer about your research?
This is confirming a lot of things they may have already instinctually known or believed to be true, which is that NEPA and filling out an environmental impact statement takes a really long time and is likely to be litigated over. If you’re a developer who can’t avoid putting your energy project on federal land, you may just want to avoid moving forward with it – the cost may outweigh whatever revenue you could get from that project because you can’t know how much money you’ll have to pour into it.
Huh. Sounds like everything is working well. I do think your work identifies a clear risk in developing on federal lands, which is baked into the marketplace now given the pause on permits for renewables on federal lands.
Yeah. And if you think about where the best places would be to put these technologies? It is on federal lands. The West is way more federal land than anywhere else in the county. Nevada is a great place to put solar — there’s a lot of sun. But we’re not going to put anything there if we can’t put anything there.
What’s the remedy?
We propose a set of policy suggestions. We think the judicial review process could be sped along or not be as burdensome. Our research most obviously points to shortening the statute of limitations under the Administrative Procedures Act from six years to six months, because a great deal of the projects we reviewed made it in that time, so you’d see more cases in good faith as opposed to someone waiting six years waiting to challenge it.
We also think engaging stakeholders much earlier in the process would help.
The Bureau of Land Management says it will be heavily scrutinizing transmission lines if they are expressly necessary to bring solar or wind energy to the power grid.
Since the beginning of July, I’ve been reporting out how the Trump administration has all but halted progress for solar and wind projects on federal lands through a series of orders issued by the Interior Department. But last week, I explained it was unclear whether transmission lines that connect to renewable energy projects would be subject to the permitting freeze. I also identified a major transmission line in Nevada – the north branch of NV Energy’s Greenlink project – as a crucial test case for the future of transmission siting in federal rights-of-way under Trump. Greenlink would cross a litany of federal solar leases and has been promoted as “essential to helping Nevada achieve its de-carbonization goals and increased renewable portfolio standard.”
Well, BLM has now told me Greenlink North will still proceed despite a delay made public shortly after permitting was frozen for renewables, and that the agency still expects to publish the record of decision for the line in September.
This is possible because, as BLM told me, transmission projects that bring solar and wind power to the grid will be subject to heightened scrutiny. In an exclusive statement, BLM press secretary Brian Hires told me via e-mail that a secretarial order choking out solar and wind permitting on federal lands will require “enhanced environmental review for transmission lines only when they are a part of, and necessary for, a wind or solar energy project.”
However, if a transmission project is not expressly tied to wind or solar or is not required for those projects to be constructed… apparently, then it can still get a federal green light. For instance in the case of Greenlink, the project itself is not explicitly tied to any single project, but is kind of like a transmission highway alongside many potential future solar projects. So a power line can get approved if it could one day connect to wind or solar, but the line’s purpose cannot solely be for a wind or solar project.
This is different than, say, lines tied explicitly to connecting a wind or solar project to an existing transmission network. Known as gen-tie lines, these will definitely face hardships with this federal government. This explains why, for example, BLM has yet to approve a gen-tie line for a wind project in Wyoming that would connect the Lucky Star wind project to the grid.
At the same time, it appears projects may be given a wider berth if a line has other reasons for existing, like improving resilience on the existing grid, or can be flexibly used by not just renewables but also fossil energy.
So, the lesson to me is that if you’re trying to build transmission infrastructure across federal property under this administration, you might want to be a little more … vague.